When you think of the Cross…what comes to your mind?
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Immanuel means God is with us. It is not a prayer. It is a statement.
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Did you ever wonder in one person could confess the sin of a nation?
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Belshazzar cannot say, “Gee, I didn’t know”…How about me?
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Sin, working to saturate our lives, like a flash of lightening, breaks into our world with catastrophic impact.
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How’s your self-image? Do you think feeling a wretch a good thing?
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Ever want to cut through the junk, and get to the meat…
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What do we do when we find ourselves contrary to God’s design? We go to God and say we are sorry, seeking His forgiveness, knowing that He forgives AND heals.
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We, human beings, think we need to do something to earn God’s love. The fancy phrase is conditional love. It means you must first do something that pleases God, and then he may show you some love. That is not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible unconditionally loves you. He loved us before we loved him.
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I have several good friends who describe themselves as “friends of Bill W”. You may know what that means. It means they follow the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps. I have tremendous respect for them. I have learned so much about following Jesus from them. They are people who understand life is a spiritual process—and they understand the need to put things in their life to death. Listen to the words in this letter: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you…” and “But now you must put them all away…”
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In these early chapters of Genesis we see not merely a tale of something that happened long ago, but something that happens every day. Every day God creates. Every day God breathes life into the world. Every day I take a bite from the forbidden fruit. Every day I make decisions to make myself the most important person—more important than God. These scenes play out over and over again in the lives of human beings… and if that is the point, then perhaps we should consider how this story is our story.
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Ideas have power. They move our lives in specific direction. Most of us know the ideas that are guiding us, at least at some level. When challenges comes into our lives these guiding ideas either confirm, confuse, or collapse our world. At times these situations and challenges, often painful, reveal wrong thinking, you might say, crossed-wires. In today's reading from John 9, Jesus exposes "crossed-wire" thinking.
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Sin, not a popular party topic. Not a popular topic at all. It seems that in our world today we don’t talk about sin. Is sin even real? Is sin the invention of religious types to keep the masses under control?
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When we experience pain and loss, we often, maybe even always, want to know “why”. It is our nature. We often think, if we could just understand the “why”, then our pain would diminish. Let me suggest there is a “why”, but it will not diminish your pain.
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